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Dr Musson states that both earthquakes are believed to have had their epicentre around the Leadenhall Market area in the poorer east end of the city but that Westminster Abbey also received damage from the second earthquake.

Dr Musson said: “It's not common knowledge because people are not clued up on what is in rare books I study.

“They say that many houses shook and we only know from what many educated people wrote at the time but there are a large deal of press records and coverage of the earthquakes because they were in London.

“Many more earthquakes happen in places like rural Wales but because this was in London, people studied it in a far greater manner and books were written about it.

“There is known to have been great shaking across the whole city. The first one was felt 500 square kilometres away while the bigger second one saw shaking as far as 2,000 square kilometres away and was felt in Buckinghamshire.”

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Reports include one that reveals that at just after 12.30pm on February 8, 1750, Britain’s Lord Chancellor Philip Yorke was sitting in Westminster Hall when the room began to shake and that “for a moment everyone thought the great edifice was going to collapse on their heads”.

Throughout the City and Westminster, people felt their desks lurch, chairs shake, doors slam, windows rattle and crockery clatter.

In Leadenhall Street, part of a chimney fell while in Southwark, south of the Thames, a slaughterhouse with a hay-loft collapsed.

Dr Musson added: “At the time in 1750 nobody had any idea and nobody really knew it all came from 15 kilometres or so underground. Some thought the earthquake came from the atmosphere like a storm. There were many wrong ideas.”

Earthquakes are far more common in the likes of Nepal (Photo by Omar Havana/Getty Images)

While those quakes started a “year of earthquakes” across Britain in 1750, London hasn’t felt one of the same size since.

But why have there been so many earthquakes in Surrey this year yet none in Croydon or elsewhere in London?

Dr Musson isn't sure, although he pointed out that the ground beneath London is mainly clay while beneath Surrey it is mostly chalk.

But he added: “There is no specific reason why there are many earthquakes in one place and not another, and I don’t think the land around [you] is any indication of where an earthquake will take place.”